1. My introduction to blogging. My good friend, David White, who's not a teacher , introduced me to Blogger, thinking it was something I'd be interested in, and I set one up early in 2003, but I didn't see the point of it then, so after creating a blog and posting once, I abandoned this. I'd love to recover the account and see what I wrote then, but I now can't remember what email I used to set it up.

2. Blogging with students.9th July, 2003. Teaching a summer course with two groups at the Young Learner Centre, British Council, Barcelona, I'd asked for regular computer room slots as I was keen to try out a new British Council learner community (Global Village), getting the two groups to communicate to each other. However, just before the summer course started, I was told that it wouldn't be possible to register my students for the community, and so I had to find an alternative quickly. I remembered Blogger, and so set up this blog. The first post was an example for the students, who set up their own blogs the first day of the course. I then had them write on their blogs and comment on the blogs of the other class during the course. I started using blog-efl to reflect on the class, accidentally discovering what a great tool a blog is for teacher reflection. This I continued throughout July 2003, coming home from class and spending most afternoons blogging or trying to find out what other educational bloggers had been doing.

What http://blog-efl.blogspot.com used to look like in 2003

3. Connecting with colleagues.Nik Peachey, who I'd met at International House, Barcelona, when we were both working there, and who had become webmaster for the British Council website TeachingEnglish, contacted me because he'd heard that I'd been blogging (through the online M.Ed we were both doing at that time) and had also come across a teacher in Portugal, Teresa Almeida D'Eça who was blogging with her young learners. By now, the summer course had finished, but I had become enthused with the potential of blogging and was scouring the Web, trying desperately to find other English teachers who were blogging. It quickly became apparent that there weren't that many - there weren't even that many edu-bloggers around. Teresa was one of the three ESL bloggers that I'd come across that had started blogging with their students before me. Her blog, Fun with English, was an example of a very different approach to blogging - more controlled (because of the age of the learners), but a very interesting one that was obviously motivating her students. I reviewed her blog at the end of July 2003.

4. The first ESL blogger. Teresa had started blogging because she'd read Aaron Campbell's article about 'Weblogs for use with ESL classes' (Feb 2003), which quickly became the blueprint for ESL blogging, establishing a norm for blogging with students using either a tutor blog (owned and written to only by the teacher), class blog (owned by the teacher but written to by teacher and learners) or learner blogs (individual blogs, owned by the learners). Aaron had been using a combination of these, but his New Tanuki was a great model of how to connect a Tutor blog with learner blogs. Aaron had also been blogging since early in 2002, making him (I believe) the first ESL Blogger.

6. English for Tourism. When I started teaching again, at Turismo Sant Ignasi, I introduced the concept of blogging to my students there. Here's an example of the blog one of my students, Chiara kept. I did my best to encourage the students to blog, but we did this for one term only, and the students did not blog much. I was learning about blogging with students, though. One of the problems was trying to do too much. In my enthusiasm, I'd started learner blogs with all of my students, which was just too much for me to realistically handle. I do remember though, after starting these blogs, that there was absolutely nothing on a Google search for 'tourism blog' until we'd set these up, so I can safely say that these blogs were the first blogs anyone had set up for Tourism!

7. Image blogs. I also taught ESP to students who were studying Image at Politecnico Sant Ignasi, and I started to concentrate on this. This blogging project was more successful, and I continued it from 2003-2006 with students on the Image courses. It was always a popular feature of the course, and got good feedback from students.

7 comments:

Hi Graham. Congratulations on your tenth year as a blogger using "Blog-EFL" for blogging such challenging, innovative, and controversial posts. Thanks for sharing and inspiring us to follow/imitate you. BTW, I invite you to read my posts at http://victorhugor.blogspot.com and leave some encouraging comments. I need some tips.Best regards!

Thank, Victor Hugo! I'm going to follow this post up with another on tips that I've learnt since I've been blogging over the years, which may be useful to you - I've also started following your blog, which looks great.

Congrats Graham.I just took the plunge "seriously" for me this year so I'm quite ashamed. http://susanhillyard.blogspot.com.ar/You have really devoted a great amount of time to it and that's where it all breaks down for me. So I'm doing a cheaty-type one and just putting up all the stuff I have on my machine lying dormant, which is what I hope to be doing for the rest of this school year! Congrats again!You spurred me on to do more!Susan HillyardArgentina.

It is always reinvigorating to look back and see how far we've gone, right, Graham? I remember attending some EVO webinars back in 2006 where you were a guest speaker and being in awe of how much you were doing back then. I also remember very dearly a recording about blogging you did for me and Erika for a presentation...Always good times of learning together with the Webhead community.

Great post. I just located your blog and wished to let you know that I have certainly loved reading your blogs. At any rate I’m going to be subscribing to your feed and I really hope you are writing again soon.